


The Night Is Still Young

by matchka



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Intersectionality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-07
Updated: 2012-06-07
Packaged: 2017-11-07 04:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/427137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchka/pseuds/matchka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Major Zero/Sigint - intersectionality, and making the best of it in the Special Forces. Written for Queerfest2012</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Is Still Young

They lay curled in the darkness, listening to the insistent patter of rain against the window and the sound of traffic several floors below. The room smells of sex, and fresh cigarette smoke. It's not Zero's apartment. Nor is it Donald's. Familiarity is unsafe, and now there are secrets that need keeping.

“I don't know if this is at all important,” Zero says, watching as Donald reclines, his sleek, sweat-dappled physique blue in the moonlight. “But I'd never slept with a black man before tonight.”

The corners of the younger man's mouth curl upwards into a smile. Or is it a smirk? Difficult to tell; Donald takes so little seriously unless it can be painstakingly dismantled, component by component, and reassembled into something better. A cigarette hangs loose in one hand, snowing ash onto the blankets.

“Maybe,” Donald says, contemplative in spite of himself. “I'd never slept with a man at all before tonight. I guess that makes us just about even, doesn't it?”

*

The young man is dark, and tall, and fiercely intelligent. He's young - Zero isn't sure how young, but there's a bright, idealistic spark in his eyes, and he moves with a nervous energy Zero hasn't possessed in decades. 

He's also black.

That last point doesn't trouble Zero, who has lived a patchwork of lives all across the globe, has seen men of so many shades it makes his head spin to consider the sheer variety. It's nothing so pretentious as colourblindness - the young man is as Negro as he is white, his skin the rich ruddy brown of wet earth, his hair coiled into tight black springs. No. It's simply more important to Zero to recognise that Donald Anderson is a genius.

When he introduces Donald to the rest of the team, the reactions are predictably mixed. It's reminiscent of the time he hired Dr Clark and had to explain, to his bewildered team of hardened military men and refined gents with multiple degrees, that the pretty lady in the chiffon scarf could out-smart just about every one of them. Out-talk them, too, but that was another matter.

There's another thing about Donald, and that is something Zero would not deign to share with his teammates - not even The Boss, whose serene countenance and refusal to judge inspires the kind of comradeship he has felt with nobody - not even Jack (who, even as he watches Donald work, the fine musculature of his jaw twitching in thought, haunts Zero's thoughts like an old ghost.) And that is that he is inexplicably, terribly attracted to the young man. 

There are similarities to Jack. He's obsessed with firearms, for example. Zero has watched him pare down a gun to its bare bones, hands moving deftly and with such swiftness that it seems he must know the weapon intimately. And like Jack, he is prone to bouts of extreme singlemindedness; his focus is unshakeable. He shows a dedication to his craft that The Boss herself would admire.

It is the latter quality that Zero lauds as Donald's main selling-point, when he finds himself in the somewhat distasteful position of having to justify employing a Negro to do, as his superiors put it, a 'white man's' job. It takes a rare dedication, he tells them, to learn so much in such a short time, and with such insurmountable odds. It would be beyond foolish, he explains, dismissing their scepticism with a practised wave of his hand, to dismiss such a mind based only on the skin that surrounds it. Martin Luther King had a dream, and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and yet here he is, having to wheedle and bargain for a black man on the payroll.

It's easier for Zero. He can hide that which makes him unacceptable. He chooses his lovers by process of elimination: do they know who he is? Will they out him to his employers? It's hardly dignified, and Zero prefers celibacy, for the most part – easier, he thinks, to have nothing to hide, to play the dignified British bachelor. And, to use one of his father's more vulgar idioms, you don't shit on your own doorstep. The Special Forces is an incestuous place at the best of times; word travels like a virus, and nobody stops to differentiate truth from rumour. 

There was Jack, of course, perhaps his greatest indiscretion, but Jack is passion, and fire, and he does not talk; his lips are not loose. Zero wonders if Jack cares at all about gender, or whether he cares more about the experience itself than the anatomy of who he's fucking. He suspects the latter. Jack does not talk, because he considers it nothing to talk about.

He propositions Donald only after much consideration. He has no proof that the younger man is attracted to him, or even that he'd deign to sleep with another man, but they enjoy each other's company, and that is a start. 

“I'm not completely sure what you're asking me,” Donald says. He's fiddling idly with what used to be a gun and is now a scattered mess of parts and shapes Zero could only identify under extreme duress. There's no alarm in his eyes, and only a smidgen of suspicion. All things considered, it's going rather well.

“I'm asking you to spend the night with me,” Zero replies. “I'm sorry to be so direct. It's just...”

“S'okay,” Donald interrupts, sensing the other man's discomfort. He rolls a cylinder between thick fingers, a smooth motion that leaves Zero wondering what else he can do with his hands. “Just wanted to be clear. Wanted to know what I was getting into.”

“So you'll...”

“I know this apartment...” Donald begins, his eyes bright in the gloom. 

*

“This can't happen again.”

Donald's expression cycles rapidly between confusion, hurt, relief, before landing squarely on 'curiosity'. He turns; the springs in the ancient bed cry in complaint. “Why?” he asks. There's a stub of a cigarette between his fingers, burning red as it gutters.

Zero smiles without warmth, without humour. Stretched out beneath the blankets, he is acutely aware of his ageing body, of the pallor of his skin and the wrinkles and scars that adorn it. Donald hadn't seemed to mind. Neither had Jack. It strikes him just how similar the two are, at least in this arena.

“You'll never work again,” he says, “if they find out. If they can pin this on you.”

Donald shrugs. “You've done okay.”

“That's because they have no idea. About me. About who I am.”

The words hang between them, pregnant with implications, none of them good. Donald squeezes the dying cigarette, extinguishing the last of its heat. Zero watches him, silent. The bedsprings press insistently into his soft flesh. Donald's brow is furrowed in concentration, his brain ticking like a well-oiled machine.

Finally, after what seems like forever, he speaks.

“The night's still young,” Donald says. 

“I'm not,” Zero replies, and rubs his forehead with the balls of his hands. God, he's so young, so full of fire, so dismissive of the trouble he might find himself in. A Negro who sleeps with other men. With other white men. With other white men of a senior rank. And yet, here he is, caressing Zero with wide, flat hands, eager to repeat the experience.

“I can make you feel young,” Donald says.

And he can. Oh god, he can.


End file.
